Virtual Reality, VR, Immersive Technology & Simulated Environment

Google Daydream: The New Mobile VR Ecosystem & Platform

Recently, during Google I/O 2016 event, Google has announced its new venture in the VR industry. Called as ‘Daydream‘, it is a new platform for low-latency, immersive and interactive mobile virtual reality. It is another VR arm of Google beside the existing Cardboard. While Cardboard provides a light-weight, fun, simple and affordable way for people to play around with VR apps, Daydream aspires to be a high quality mobile virtual reality. You can called it as the successor to Cardboard too. Based on these two big initiatives, it clearly looks that Google is targeting the mobile market for VR.

More on Daydream…

From its simple website, it shows that the main aims for Daydream is to bring the favourite and popular apps to virtual reality and exploring a more comfortable headsets with the intuitive controller. This whole things will provide a richer VR experiences to the users. One aspect they really want to solve is on the latency part where they target it to be under 20 milliseconds. It will improve the performance on how fast the display pixels change in response to your head move. The lower the latency, the lower risk of you feeling sick or nausea.

It also provides the tools for the developer community who are keen to build something for Daydream. With the Google VR SDK (Software Development Kit), it will let you build the VR stuff for Daydream-ready smartphones and headsets. At this moment, it is only for Android OS.

What distinguish this new VR platform and Cardboard is the controller. With Daydream-ready headset, you can interact with the apps by using its own controller. The controller has a clickable touchpad, ‘App’ and ‘Home’ buttons and it can also track its rotation and orientation with high accuracy. Below is how the Daydream controller looks like based on its emulator.

At this moment, there are eight companies that will build the Daydream-ready phones. They are Samsung, Xiaomi, HTC, LG, Huawei, Alcatel, ASUS and ZTE. You might see the “VR Ready” tag on the latest smartphones soon. In the latest Android N (Nougat) version, the OS will have a feature called as “Android VR Mode“. This special mode will give VR apps the exclusive access to processor cores while they are in the foreground, reducing latency. This video below will show you the aspiration of this grand VR initiative…

From what we can see, this is the grand and ultimate ecosystem and framework of mobile VR for Google where it will also have its own VR store. It will also have a special VR version for Street View, YouTube, Google Play Store, Google Photos and Play Movies. Can’t wait for this Fall 2016 to see more of it. For more info, you can visit:
1) The Google Daydream Official Site
2) “Gear VRs for everyone! Google turns Android into a VR-ready OS: Daydream” from Ars Technica.